Tax changes needed

I hope ev­ery­one in New­ton County read the re­cent ar­ti­cle about the new chair­man of the New­ton County Cham­ber of Com­merce and his re­marks. Mr Mur­phy hit the nail on the head sev­eral times in his com­ments. He stated that only 10 of 98 Bax­ter em­ploy­ees lo­cated in New­ton and that we have to find out why. That is true. With New­ton in at 35 per­cent, we have to do bet­ter. He also men­tioned that we have to at­tract more core busi­ness to New­ton County. That is true. We have to at­tract busi­nesses that we have the work­force to fill and that will in­crease our rev­enue stream. He also men­tioned that we have to get more in­put from county lead­ers and cit­i­zens of our county. That is also true. Be­lieve it or not, we have cit­i­zens in New­ton who have good ideas and good heads on their shoul­ders. I hope all our elected lead­ers and com­mu­nity lead­ers will work with Mr Mur­phy to move our county for­ward.

Now, I would like to add my two cents in. I be­lieve to at­tract these busi­nesses, good eat­ing es­tab­lish­ments, good cloth­ing stores and other high-end busi­nesses, as well as Bax­ter em­ploy­ees, that we have to make some short-term sac­ri­fices to lower taxes.

We have to get our county and school mil­lage rates down to more com­pa­ra­ble lev­els with the coun­ties we will be com­pet­ing with for these busi­nesses. If we could lower our county mil­lage to around 10 and our school mil­lage to around 16 to 18 ( closer to the state av­er­age) OR raise home­stead ex­emp­tions, then freeze them for 2 to 5 years, then we would start see­ing some of this busi­ness and Bax­ter em­ploy­ees mov­ing here. It may even take a freeze on im­pact fees to spur the qual­ity growth. Yes, it will be hard on our gov­ern­ments short term, but it will show these busi­nesses that we are a county that wants them to lo­cate here. Long term, it would in­crease rev­enue streams and add to our qual­ity of life. Just my two cents. Thank you, Den­nis Tay­lor Ox­ford Ge­or­gia